Digital video capabilities can be incorporated into a wide range of devices, including digital televisions, digital direct broadcast systems, wireless broadcast systems, personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptop or desktop computers, digital cameras, digital recording devices, digital media players, video gaming devices, video game consoles, cellular or satellite radio telephones, video teleconferencing devices, and the like. Digital video devices implement video compression techniques, such as those described in the standards defined by MPEG-2, MPEG-4, ITU-T H.263 or ITU-T H.264/MPEG-4, Part 10, Advanced Video Coding (AVC), ITU-T H.265 (also referred to High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC)), and extensions of such standards, to transmit and receive digital video information more efficiently.
Video compression techniques perform spatial prediction and/or temporal prediction to reduce or remove redundancy inherent in video sequences. For block-based video coding, a video frame or slice may be partitioned into macroblocks or coding tree units (CTUs). In the remainder of this document, the two terms macroblocks and CTUs are used interchangeably. Each macroblock can be further partitioned. Macroblocks in an intra-coded (I) frame or slice are encoded using spatial prediction with respect to neighboring macroblocks. Macroblocks in an inter-coded (P or B) frame or slice may use spatial prediction with respect to neighboring macroblocks in the same frame or slice or temporal prediction with respect to other reference frames.
After video data has been encoded, the video data may be packetized for transmission or storage. The video data may be assembled into a video file conforming to any of a variety of standards, such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) base media file format and extensions thereof, such as the AVC file format.
After the video data has been packetized for transmission or storage, a client device may request the packetized video data at a suitable quality. For example, the client device may request the packetized video data at a relatively high-quality when a bandwidth between the client device and a digital video device transmitting the packetized video is high and request the packetized video data at a relatively low-quality when a bandwidth between the client device and a digital video device transmitting the packetized video is low.